Westminstenders: Blue Passports

[RedToothBrush]

Yay for the blue passports.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all

May next year bring us £350 million for the NHS, cake, unicorns, financial passporting, access to the single market, Irish love and of course control to the people.

(Apologies been up to my eyeballs. Normal service will resume after Christmas).

The original Larry Elliott article.

www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/17/heretics-welcome-economics-needs-a-new-reformation

The FT ran something similar a couple of years back (sadly lost in the mists of google algorithms). I am halfway though Mervyn King's The End of Alchemy. He is saying similar in a regulatory / central banking context.

Splendid fun on SM today. Brexitors are trying to impersonate remain labour to attack lib dems. Some cross bunnies out there. . Cross party #FBPE seems to have annoyed them a little bit.

In fairness, many left rebels refuse knighthoods etc, others accept them.

However, the hardright Brexiters' are quite different:
their "rebellion against the elite" is not against the privileges of the moneyed class or aristocracy

• it is about their anger at losing the privilege of being able to look down & sneer on groups who tend to be at the bottom of the heap

to publically use words that demean people of colour, other religions or nationalities, women.

The leaders are often the less respectable side of the ruling class, those who are angry that they have to put a polite social veneer on how much they despise those they consider inferior
and sheer fury that those they despise are not staying at the bottom of the ladder

woman Many Brexiters have always pretended to be leftwing,
or to have been formerly leftwing, but switched because of "political correctness"

It's all attempts to convince those on the left who would never listen seriously to an open Tory

And as a counterbalance to Larry Elliott:

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/economics-and-finance/dismal-ignorance-of-the-dismal-science-a-response-to-larry-elliot

Such ill-informed expert bashing is exactly what gives politicians the excuse they need to make policy whilst ignoring evidence. It is also very distant from the empirically based discipline that we see as modern economics.

We're really being ruled by the Punk generation now, aren't we? They grew up.

Just as it was possible for anyone, whether or not they could actually play an instrument, to be in a band (they'd tired of the musicians experts), so it is now desirable to ignore the experts and go their own sweet way towards Anarchy in the UK.

I can just see Gove with a pink mohican and safetypins through his pants

If you want to reform the banking system, howabout , you get on and work on that

It's possible blockchain has started that process anyway.

Some Brexiters like Fox and DD are breathtakingly ignorant
Those like Deadwood and Moggy know pretty well what they are doing

Unfortunately, all the Tory hard right Brexiters - whether clever or thick - want to make the rich even richer

• and they've found that populism and blaming foreigners is a great way to trick turkeys into voting for Xmas.

We're really being ruled by the Punk generation now, aren't we? They grew up.

You are doing punks a huge disservice here. All the punks I know are fervently anti-fascist. They have been out opposing BNP marches and right-wing marches in black neighborhoods for decades. They fought for equality and stood against a system that gave advantage to the rich.

Punk music reacted against a music scene (particularly prog rock) that disenfranchised the poor who couldn't afford music lessons and didn't go to posh schools where this was taught. It wasn't against experience or experts, it was against a system that only allowed a small minority of people who had money to become these things.

Lots of eminent feminists in punk too:

Poly Styrene, Poison Girls, Siouixie, The Slits, Throbbing Gristle. Proper noisy 'not having to dress up as a Stepford Wife in drag' women.

Not having to talk and act like one either.

Punk was mostly for and by the working class, apart from the Clash, and everyone still loves Joe Strummer anyway.

So not really relevant to those corrupt philistine toffs.

"Punk music reacted against a music scene (particularly prog rock) that disenfranchised the poor who couldn't afford music lessons and didn't go to posh schools where this was taught. It wasn't against experience or experts, it was against a system that only allowed a small minority of people who had money to become these things."

Ha! That's what the blurb said!

Awful lot of those bands were middle-class ex-grammar and private school.

Yes, there were working class anti-establishment punks. A lot of them, particularly later, joined with the skinheads and were definitely right wing. Anything went, left or right wing, so long as it trashed what went before.

It was just before my generation: my friend's brother was a punk and I remember well his friends. You'll find a lot of rightwing views among the working class.

Awful lot of those bands were middle-class ex-grammar and private school
Which ones?

I'm too young to have been an old school punk myself, but I had a group of friends who were old punks when I was in my teens. They lived in Yorkshire and used to go and stand against the BNP skinheads marching through Bradford and the mining towns. They had grown up in ex-mining villages and I can assure you not a single one went to a grammer school.

They were anti-thatcher and would be just as against this lot. They were some of the most open minded and inclusive people I have ever met, except when it came to music when they suffered a terrible level inverse snobbery.

Just delurking to give my tuppence worth on music.

Modern punk of various sub genres is intensely anti-violence, anti-fascist and middle of the road politically. It is inclusive. Punk has grown up, and it doesn't mean that everyone who used to don docs and a fauxhican has started wearing corduroys. The economics article posted upthread by howabout (which I, as a millennial in just about every sense, find exciting) was about how economics needs to be treated with a more scientific approach. That economists should propose theories based on evidence, which can be empirically tested etc. Only that way does progress lie. Well the same is true of punk music! It didn't die in 1990 to a chorus of Eton Rifles. It informs what came after, and what continues now.

To quote a heavy post punk band's response to how we behave as humans:
Cowards and theives. Though we never turn to grieve the damage done, never see, never quake with rage at what we have become...

It didn't die in 1990 to a chorus of Eton Rifles.

Ah, Paul "Mr. Middle Class" Weller ... If it wasn't for the sheer vitriol in "Going Underground" ... a wasted voice .

And middle-class or not, Taking off his turban they say 'Is this man a jew ?' is one of rocks greatest opening lines. Especially when coupled with:

They put up a poster saying he earns more than you.

(and before this post disappears in a puff of meta, the song "Clampdown" predicts how revolution turns to reaction:

Judge says five to ten but I say double that again (coz I'm working for the clampdown)

(Goes off to dig out some vinyl).

I think the argument against middle class, grammar school punks is neither here nor there. These things aren't mutually exclusive. Kids don't choose their school, their parents do. And nothing causes middle class children to rebel more than their middle class parents.

And for those of us who grew up in a post punk era, grammar schools are largely places where our parents were only partially educated if at all - my mum had two years in such a school before it closed down and she was shuffled off to a secondary modern.

There's a reason the current cohort of younger adults don't share their baby booming parents tastes in music or politics.

There's a reason the current cohort of younger adults don't share their baby booming parents tastes in music or politics.

And yet DS21s Deezer list could almost have started where I left off in the early 90s. Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Sabbath, plus early U2, Clash, Damned, even Joy Division.

Here's his last FB status update ...

Id rather drag my balls across broken glass than vote tory

I went to a grammer school. I grew up in a crumbling Victorian semi with no central heating and drug dealers living next door. Not everyone who went to grammer school was middle class, though I did study Latin, so maybe that balances out growing up in a shit hole with no money.

I've always thought punk/heavy metal/death metal very inclusive

Ds1 (14) is really into iron maiden and AC/DC

I've also succeeded in getting him into depeche mode #mumgoals 😁

mrsr - have you seen the Jeremy Deller documentary, about obsessive DM fans? In parts of Russia they are viewed as quasi-profits and they have a Dave Gahan day on 9 May (his birthday). It's fab - I think Deller was commissioned to make it but then the band or their management didn't like it so it was never released but there is a very grainy pirated version on YouTube: .

DGRosetti, I believe you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. We can take all the things that have come before, and continue them. Ideas start then grow and develop...your son sounds brilliant!

Bigly my mum lived in a freezing end terrace council house while at grammar school. Child of the fifties, I guess.

I was born in the '80s. I was born in a council flat though. 4 kids in a two bedroom maisonette! Crazy times. The freezing Victorian semi was an improvement space wise, even though it still had an outside toilet when we moved in.

Ah I see bigly. No grammars where I am but my recent family history reads like a story of 20th century middle England. Grandparents poor working class (always worked), lived in the same council house for 50+ years. Parents benefitted from all the things that went with their generation - a bit of grammar school for mum, and enough new industry for dad to start a successful business. Sent me and my sister to private schools and universities, whilst completely failing to understand how school and unis really work. We vote green, to their disgust.

I am a privately educated punk fan. I may be a little sensitive about this 😂

I am a privately educated punk fan. I may be a little sensitive about this

My parents tried to send me to private school but I refused after we visited and my mind exploded at the sight of all these posh girls in tennis whites. I felt like I had wandered into an alternative dimension. The local grammer was a compromise.

I still maintain that my biggest influence in terms on education was seeing both my parents do OU degrees as adults with full-time jobs and 4 kids to look after. Their example gave me more motivation and belief in my ability to study at a high level than all the years I spent in grammer school. I still don't know how they did it!